ValueArb

I quibble with the "$100B in arms" accounting the administration wants us to believe. Taking equipment out of storage that is so old that it's too obsolete for our troops to use and then marking it up to present day prices is misleading. Nearly everything we've sent to Ukraine (Javelins, ATACMS, Abrams, Bradleys) was ready to be scrapped, and we have tons more of all of them in storage that we'll never use. And I wish they'd understand that Russia where they are is only a temporary "victory".

If someone says rates are going down, I'm buying stocks. If they say we are having a soft landing, I'm buying stocks. If they say no a recession is starting, I'm buying stocks. If fed raises rates, I'm buying stocks. To tell the truth, I don't even know how to buy bonds;)

Thanks, I've been watching it a while. It's not cheap enough and doesn't have any significant activists involved.

Preview Systems back in 2001. They announced they were shutting their doors and returning all excess cash to shareholders which they expected to be about $3.25 and the stock price dropped to $2.90. At that point I had rarely invested in individual stocks and I was reading Buffett's shareholder letters and Securities Analysis for the first time. I kept thinking it couldn't be true, that I must be missing some sort of substantial risk and went over their financials with a fine tooth comb but couldn't come up with any other than they would have to be a total fraud. I finally said, "what would Buffett do" and ended up diving in. From my (admittedly weak) memory, I bought a ton at $2.90, and 2 months later it paid out something like $3, and I ended up getting close to $3.90 in total over the next 3 years. So only about a 35% gain, but for 60 day holding period. But its much bigger payoff was convincing me to start value investing where I doubled my portfolio several times over the next 6 years from pure stock picking.

Get behind Me, Satan! Spare me your temptations for I have chosen to only walk the path of the righteous and profitable in their daily business! Ok, thanks, I'll take a look.

I have been in the midst of dumping my failed bio-tech net-nets this month. Turns out I'm not good at handicapping which will rationally return capital and which will continue to throw shareholder equity on the craps table for another dice throw. The one I'm continuing to hold is FIXX as a special level of torture. $1 basis, at least $1.36 a share in net cash + up to 30 cents in an equity investment, trading at 56 cents after announcing a reverse merger.

Nothing better than finding a good company operating in obscurity. Thanks for sharing!

Rule #1 is don't lose money, Rule #2 is never forget rule #1, and Rule #3 is every second spent thinking about what the fed is doing or will do is a second wasted.

I'd agree that both Afghanistan and Iraq aren't strategically important to the US. But hopefully both parties should realize how strategically important Ukraine is. Essentially it's collapse gets Putin nearly halfway back to the geographic reach and economic power of the USSR. We have been helping defend Europe from Russia for nearly 80 years. This is just an extension of that effort.

You realize there is no compelling evidence that anyone blew up those pipelines, don't you? https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/10/nordstream-ii-electric-instapundit.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(film) No matter what the fed does, interest costs on the national debt are going to continue to skyrocket for a few years as debt rolls over to the new rates (and to a smaller part as we add new debt). Jane Fonda will tell you it's a potential catastrophe!

Couldn't I do same just with dollars instead of BTC? Or does Argentina have strict controls on moving assets into other currencies?

Occasionally tender offers get modified to strip out the odd lot provision when its abused. I've read about the DCBO arbitrage in so many places now that I'm worried about this happening.

Perfect fit for country that invented eclairs methinks. I had to stop eating KKD because they are just too sweet, but once in a blue moon oh yes.

Duh?

Can you go into more detail into how this is a business case for BTC? I understand that if you are holding Argentine pesos you'd prefer to convert them to bitcoin, but not how bondholders or business owners can benefit. More specifically 1) If I own Argentine bonds, how can I use BTC to help me take advantage of that 600bp decline in YTM? 2) if I'm an Argentinian rancher, outside of cash balances how could I use Bitcoin to protect my business from devaluation? Seems like a lot of my assets are going to be in land/feed/livestock/accounts receivable.

Since almost all of my investments are in IRAs now I think I still have capital losses from the GFC that I haven't been able to use yet.

You can't imagine how old. I had a friend who was an early important employee for one of the early browser developers. When they went public his options were worth over $20M, so he bought them. The next year they were worth $4M while his AMT tax obligations had to be closer to $6M so I asked him how he dealt with the tax issue. He said he ignored it, that he always intended to hold the shares for a very long time and just put them away and wasn't going to worry about it. I think it turned out fine for him, that year the IRS just turned a blind eye to AMT obligations for employee stock options to avoid a PR nightmare.

Yet my Seritage is down below $9 today;)

Ha! I look at it every day on my screen, shake myself, and say "you owned it for four years a decade ago, remember?". It's getting very close to actually unlocking all that value but I'll never get any of it because I'm that cat that once stepped on a hot stove.

The only time I was able to take advantage of tax loss harvesting was the year the internet bubble burst. I still had a hundred thousand shares or so in an internet company that had bought a startup I worked at. I knew a fellow entrepreneur who also sold his company to same internet company and he had told me he had exercised options for millions of shares that spring after his company sold in order to hold them for long term capital gains. My lockup agreement expired in mid December but the company's stock price had fallen from $26 all the way to near $1. I had no faith in the Internet company's future so I immediately start to sell but the price kept declining on me, and after a few days it had dropped below 90 cents. Thats when I realized what was happening. My acquaintance was going to owe income tax on the $26 stock price that existed when he sold his business, because of the AMT calculation, so he likely owed over $5M in taxes. The only way to eliminate that tax obligation was to sell all those shares before the end of the year so he was taxed on the sale, not exercise, price. So despite my terror at holding on to this POS, I stopped selling and waited for January. The stock price got down to the 70 cent range IIRC on the last day of the year, then after a week or so in January was trading at $1.30 where I got out. Its almost never that you can have specific enough information on large enough holders to predict price action, this was my one time.

That's a tremendous basis, you almost bottom-ticked it. Hoping you get a monster payout, and soon.

I think the Shiller PE is the best, but still imperfect way to look at the market price to value. Lets ignore how top heavy the S&P 500 has gotten and how Shiller doesn't account for tax or interest rates and assume you could use it as a market timing tool. If you did, you'd have to be out of the market for years on end, even decades, all the while missing growth in S&P earnings until you get back in. I don't see any mechanical rule that is possible to follow from it. For example, if you get out at a 30 PE and back in at a 20 PE, it would have gotten you out in 1929 just before the peak but put you in again in 1930 to ride it down to a 70% loss in 1931. Or out in April, 1997 (800) and not back in until Oct 2008 at 1000. That looks great until you realize that adjusting your basis for dividends lowers it to $570 and increases your returns to 5% annualized. So if you had the incredible self-will made of pure steel making decisions emotionlessly on positive expectation mathematics that is necessary in order to be able to sit out the market for 11 and a half years you would have, roughly broken even holding bonds instead of the market? In reality if you are going to actively invest, measures of how cheap or expensive the market is shouldn't matter at all. You either find attractively priced opportunities, or you build up cash and keep looking in different places. If the S&P 500 is overvalued, that doesn't mean mid-caps or small caps are, and if they are all generally overvalued that doesn't mean there aren't still a few great opportunities in all of them. Buffett clearly described the internet bubble as it was happening, but he didn't sell his stocks. No one did.

You only want to adopt a non-consensus view if the consensus view is wrong. If the market is generally efficient the consensus is right a lot more than it's wrong. So how do you know when the consensus is wrong? Only when the fundamental value of an investment is clearly and significantly different than its price. To know that you don't have to care what analysts think, or how much their ratings actually affect anything, but you do have to know the fundamental value of the investment, ie it has to lie within your circle of competence.

I remember loving Azimov's Foundation books when I was young. The idea of a system or a person that can accurately predict social, economic and political futures was great science fiction, but the real world has always proven too complex. Someone may get one prediction right, but it doesn't make the odds of their next prediction being right any higher. But we love to anoint seers based on that one brilliant insight, until they prove themselves unworthy and we move on to the next one.